AVES – Smart Class Rooms for Rural India

India, the agricultural based nation, after 65 years of Independence is able to bring green, silver, and white revolution in production of goods but for better, brighter and sustainable future is fully able to spread the elemental unit of the growth which is primary education. Many of the government policies and agencies have open schools but still the drop-out rates are not decreasing as per expectation. The reason for this is ‘Quality’, which is very much affected in these schools because of unavailability or unqualified teachers. A recently concluded survey of the quality of primary school education in India shows dismal results. The results of the survey show that the percentage of students of class I who can solve a simple subtraction problem with borrowing is abysmal 29.9% while 52.2% of Class V students are not able to read a simple text from a Class II textbook.

So, to tackle such kind of problem with a running technology of ICT, volunteers at SARAS with the help of the videos developed by Ernst and Young Foundation – Toon Masti, tested the project Audio Video Education System (AVES) at primary level in two of the villages of Saran district. AVES aim is to educate students up to 5th Standard as then after that student generally access to secondary education and if this technology can help in building students interest till 5th standard then possibly dropout rate can be decreased in an effective manner.

Volunteers at SARAS have been working on this project from last 1 year and finally executed it in field in the December of 2012 with the help of the local NGO – Sahayata Seva Sansthan. The descriptive structure of the project is defined in the detailed report published by the society : http://www.sarasparivar.org/PDF/AVES-report-2012-13.pdf